~ Feminism is for everyone!

The one behind the wheel

I could not figure out a neutral, trigger-free way to lead into this post, so here is an outrageous bunny instead. Intro starts immediately following this loofah.

I am a loofah!

When discussing responsibility for an assault, people often focus on how much the victim was drinking. The arguments of those who take this approach, such as Emily Yoffe, are deeply offensive and thinly-veiled rape apologism.

However, if the attacker identified as male, there is a second question people ask after an assault that involved alcohol: was he drunk?[1] If so, the tendency is to justify his actions in light of his intoxication. After all, if he was drunk, he was not in control of his actions, and therefore could not have been at fault. He didn’t mean it. He never would have done that sober. Right?

“Drunk girl gets assaulted: she is responsible. After all, she was drinking.Drunk guy assaults girl: he is not responsible. After all, he was drinking.…Wait, what?”

You heard the cat. If we’re in the business of using alcohol to hold women responsible for being raped while simultaneously using it to excuse the actions of their rapists, I want some proof. Unfortunately for rapists, science is not on their side. Although alcohol is often found at the scene of the crime, evidence suggests that the alcohol itself is not what causes the rapist to rape. Instead, rapists use alcohol as an excuse to do things while drunk that they would gladly do while sober.[2] In addition, the central claim of their excuse – that it is possible to drink to the point of being unaware of your actions and to then sexually assault someone – is false. Here’s why.

Alcohol decreases all types of nerve cell activity in parallel: memory and consciousness decrease in tandem with ability to engage in coordinated movement. That is to say, anyone who can execute the coordinated movements necessary to force someone to engage in sexual activity against their will is sober enough to have his memory and consciousness intact. Science!

The “people can have blackouts while otherwise appearing to be totally normal” thing comes from early studies on the impacts of alcohol on memory that were conducted primarily through surveys with AA respondents, who had acquired a very high tolerance for alcohol. (More science: see section titled “Alcohol-Induced Blackouts” ) Among such participants, it is quite possible to drink to the level of blackout without outward signs, but among the vast majority of people who do not have alcohol dependence, it is very unusual / unlikely to have a blackout unaccompanied by signs such as slurred speech and uncoordinated movement.

On the blackout note, blackouts occur not because people are unaware of their actions at the time, but rather because ethanol interferes with memory encoding. That is, people who experience a blackout are conscious of what they are doing at the time; the memory is just not written down for later. Ethanol does not interfere with accessing long-term memory, which includes rules of conduct, such as not touching others’ genitals without their consent. We are still on this science thing

Okay, that was long, so let me break it down. If an attacker is sober enough to execute the coordinated movements necessary to assault someone, he is sober enough to know what he is doing. If he is so drunk that he is unaware of his actions, then he is incapable of the coordinated movements necessary to assault someone. That is, it is virtually impossible to assault someone while you are that drunk. That is, the claim that an attacker was too drunk to know what he was doing is probably false. Even if the attacker has a high tolerance for alcohol and can coordinate his movements while blacked out, he is still able to access the social rules stored in long-term memory, including rules about not assaulting other people.

Last but not least, in the Netherlands, people who commit crimes while drunk can’t legally use it as an excuse, because they are presumed to know about the effects of drinking beforehand and are considered responsible for taking that into account. This makes sense. I mean, even in the U.S. of A., when was the last time that a drunk driver who killed someone was exonerated because he was drunk? Oh, right: we don’t exonerate drunk drivers for hurting people while drunk – we arrestthem for it. We expect drivers to know about the impacts of alcohol on the brain and to take responsibility for making sure that they don’t drink to the point of harming others.

So, returning to the case of sexual assault, let’s throw society a bone and throw all that science we just learned out the window. Let’s assume that alcohol does make men suddenly and completely unable to prevent themselves from assaulting others. How unaware do you have to be to not pick up on the societal mantra that alcohol turns good men into rapists? And, how unethical do you have to be to be like, “Sure, if I get really drunk I might attack someone, but you know what, I don’t care”?

Very. The answer is very unaware and very unethical.

Confused? I made a flow chart. Click to expand, then click to magnify.

Pronouns here are male for the attacker and female for the victim to reflect the differences in social shaming toward people identified as women versus people identified as men. However, it is important to note that while perpetrators of sexual assault usually identify as male, both attacker and victim can identify as any gender.

Bottom line: the choice to use alcohol to harm another person is a choice. Whether the attacker made that choice before he got drunk or during, it was still his choice. People who make that choice cannot hide behind the alcohol. It doesn’t work that way.

Thoughts? Feelings? Write me ALL OF THEM.

___
1. Because this post is addressing the differences in how society treats men who drink (excusing them from their actions) versus how society treats women who drink (holding them responsible for other people’s actions), the pronouns in this post are male when referring to an attacker. However, it is important to note that although those who commit sexual assault predominately identify as male, both attackers and victims can and do identify as any gender. Back2. “As the quotes at the beginning of this article indicate, perpetrators often use alcohol to excuse sexual assault perpetration, whereas victims often feel guilty because they were drinking.” — Abbey, A. (2002) Alcohol-Related Sexual Assault. p. 120
There is lots of other important information in this article as well; this DDPost is specifically addressing attackers’ frequent argument that being drunk excuses them from responsibility for sexual assault. Back
** Shoutout to Susan C. Shelley for the awesome title and to all the DDPeople who helped a freaking ton with this post!

Post navigation

23 thoughts on “The one behind the wheel”

Oh, right: we don’t exonerate drunk drivers for hurting people while drunk – we arrest them for it. We expect drivers to know about the impacts of alcohol on the brain and to take responsibility for making sure that they don’t drink to the point of harming others.

Here’s my question (in the same vein as your paragraph): If we expect drivers to know the impacts of alcohol on the brain and to take responsibility, then why do we not do the same for those who sexually assault someone while drunk? Those who get into a drunken brawl are prosecuted, so why not someone who rapes while drunk? Somehow I think this speaks to the systemic lack of respect and value given to women, especially in the case of sexual assault.

That’s a seriously good question. Labordudedave is correct when he says (below) that being drunk is technically not a valid excuse at law. However, that never stopped defense attorneys from trying to make it into one, and it never stopped jurors from deciding their verdict on the basis of the “it was all a drunken mistake” myth. And it never stopped society at large from pushing survivors whose attackers were inebriated to reframe the assault as a drunken mistake, to be forgiving of this “error that could happen to anyone,” and to forego prosecuting someone for “things outside his control.” I think you are exactly right when you say that these issues are systemic and reflect and perpetuate harmful attitudes toward women.

Interesting. I’ve never seen an article or anything like that where somebody tried to defend the actions of a rapist because the rapist is drunk. It’s certainly not a valid excuse at law (our rule is exactly the same as that of the Netherlands– intoxication is only an excuse if it was forced on you by somebody else, like when somebody slips PCP into your drink). The article you link to about “rapists use alcohol as an excuse” is about the victim’s drinking, not the perpetrator’s, which really makes that link pretty misleading, I think, since it isn’t an example of what you’re using it for.

I know there was that article in the Good Men Project a while back from a rapist’s perspective, but I don’t even think that article was trying to excuse the rape because he was drunk, it was more along the lines of, “I know rape is wrong and doing it was wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway because I like partying and don’t care about other people, fuck you all.” So, I’m wondering: can anybody here give an actual concrete example of somebody disagreeing with what Barbie’s saying? In other words, can anybody point to a time when somebody specifically said that they think rapists aren’t culpable when they were drunk when they did it? It’s not a defense at law, and my quick internet search didn’t come up with anybody trying to defend it. So is this article attacking a straw man?

A lot of the public outcry about Stubenville centered around not penalizing the boys for a “mistake” they made while drunk. I have a lot of anecdotal experiences of people using that same logic, but not necessarily concrete news stories. I’ll try to look and see if I find some.

“Today I want to talk about some of the things that people do when they’re drunk, high or otherwise living a party lifestyle. Things they may never do if they were sober.”

“the partying lifestyle creates a scenario where the already-confusing world of sexual consent is so blurry that it’s almost indecipherable”

“It seems like simple basic knowledge that a person cannot consent to sex while sleeping, but somehow the man in Alyssa’s story didn’t know that, and his judgement was probably clouded by the alcohol and drugs involved.”

“the real world is a harsh, cold place full of mixed messages, drunken desire, Ecstasy-fueled touching, and the rush of cocaine. The real world is a place where “no means no” simply isn’t enough.”

“When you are drinking or drugging, regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, your judgement is impaired. And for many, sexual desire is heightened.
This puts you at risk of becoming a victim, but also at the risk of becoming a perpetrator, as your inebriation may make it unclear whether the consent you feel you have is actually consent.”

“The anonymous man who told the story we published today never set out to be a rapist, but because of his partying, he became one.”

—
The “rapists use alcohol as an excuse” includes a paragraph that reads as follows:

“But a few other studies in this area echo many of Lisak’s findings — most notably, the uncomfortable reality that most sexual predators don’t simply “slip up” after having too much to drink and accidentally violate someone’s consent. Rather, they’re often making calculated decisions to achieve their goal of assaulting multiple victims, just like the Reddit user.”

You’re right though, it’s toward the bottom and imbedded in a lengthy discussion of the correlation rather than causation between the victims’ drinking and the assault. I’ll go pull up a more on-point article and replace that link.

Hey Dave! In my opinion, this post serves a very important purpose in changing rape culture. Once a sexual assault has been committed, women have been trained SO HARD to think it was their fault, that we go to great lengths to make ourselves believe that is really was our fault. We look to every aspect of the evening for signs that we are overreacting, or that it was our fault, or even if it wasn’t our fault, the man who did it couldn’t possibly be held responsible for it. This includes questioning whether it could have been a mistake, whether his judgment about what is ok could have been impaired by drugs/alcohol, just like our response time was impaired by the drugs/alcohol. Seeing Barbie’s post –and this is *already* knowing as much as I do about this topic– really has helped me entertain the possibility that the guy who sexually assaulted me has at least partial blame (together with society) for his actions.

So, this post is not really for theoretical and philosophical lines of argument, but for helping survivors process what happened to them. By giving credit where credit is due.

Barbie already pretty much covered it but I think the issue isn’t people saying raping someone while drunk is *okay,* it’s people saying raping while inebriated is understandable. That they are someone less responsible for their actions. People imagine that they could end up making the same “mistake” (aka committing the same crime) in the same situation. But they wouldn’t. I wrote about the “I might have done that” myth and the way it enables rape apologism a fair bit in the intro sections pf my post on responsibility, as has Cliff Pervocracy..

Interesting. When I read you post on responsibility, I thought what you were talking about is the way that rapists tend to think all people think like them, which is why things like rape jokes are so damaging even if the person telling the joke does not believe rape is ok (it’s a signal to rapists that normalizes their actions). I guess this is another aspect of what you were saying there.

I think this post does an excellent job of using science to undermine popular ideas about intoxication on the assaulter’s part to absolve him of responsibility, but I have a question/concern about what is being claimed about the role of intoxication for the victim, specifically on the flow chart.

What I’m wondering about is cases where the women does “consent” at the time but later identifies the interaction as assault due to her intoxication rendering her consent invalid.

Is it implicit in this account that consent is legitimate unless intoxication is visible, as it would be if she is blackout drunk? The blue box on the right seems to suggest so (“If she was not blacked out, she would remember whether or not she consented” – suggesting that as long as she wasn’t blacked out, then if she did “consent” settles the matter). Is that the claim?

If so, this might discount some claims of assault (surely not the goal!), by using signs of visible intoxication, rather than the victim’s own account, to tell us whether she was capable of consenting at the time. Am I misunderstanding, or is there perhaps an unintended implication in the phrasing there?

Sorry it took so long for your comment to go through, and thank you for your question. I can definitely see where that box might be confusing if taken on its own, without the surrounding context of the flowchart. With the flowchart, the only way to arrive at that box is through arrows that say the victim told her attacker that he violated her boundaries. So that box is a response to someone who is trying to use the victim’s intoxication to nullify her assertion that he violated her boundaries, and the information inside the box is to be taken in that context.

So for option 1, the victim says that she did not consent, but the attacker is arguing that the victim did consent and just doesn’t remember it because she was drunk. The box responds by saying that unless the victim was blacked out, she *would* remember whether or not she consented. If the attacker responds by saying that the victim really was too drunk to remember whether she consented, the response is that in that case, there should have been visible signs of heavy intoxication, and that it was the attacker’s responsibility to be aware of them and not take advantage.

You’ve also asked a very good question about whether this framework allows someone to give consent while being somewhat intoxicated. The answer is yes; although this is definitely controversial and there are many who have excellent reasons to disagree, I think it is possible to give meaningful consent while somewhat intoxicated. However, just to make sure it’s clear, that box in the chart is reached only via the route of “Yes, the person did say that I violated her boundaries,” and its comments relate only to that scenario.